The Big Tent

Every August, a field outside a small village in mid Wales is turned into a music festival for one weekend. It is not a big event: about three thousand people come, most of them from nearby towns, and the whole thing is organized by volunteers. This year I was one of them. I had been told it would be "relaxing, a bit like camping with music". Nobody had mentioned that the festival would be built in three days.

When I arrived on Wednesday morning, the field was completely empty apart from some sheep, which were being moved to the next field by a farmer and a very tired dog. Rhian, the organizer, was standing by the gate with a clipboard and a cup of tea. "Right," she said. "The stage is being delivered at ten, the toilets are being delivered at eleven, and the big tent was supposed to have been delivered yesterday. Nobody has seen it."

By lunchtime the stage was being built by a team of six people who argued about every bolt, the toilets had been placed in a long, proud line at the bottom of the hill, and the kitchen was being set up in an old horse trailer. The big tent was the heart of the festival. All the main concerts were held in it, and if it rained, which it always did in Wales, it was where everybody went. It still had not arrived.

It finally turned up at six in the evening on the back of a lorry, in enormous canvas bags. The driver apologized: the delivery had been sent to a village with almost the same name on the other side of the mountain. We were too relieved to complain. The bags were dragged into the middle of the field, and Rhian decided that the tent would be put up first thing on Thursday.

Thursday began with rain. The tent was being unpacked when Owen, a retired engineer who had volunteered every year since the festival began, held up a corner of the canvas and frowned. "This is red," he said. Another corner was pulled out. "And this is yellow." Our tent had always been plain white. Within twenty minutes the truth was clear. We had been sent a circus tent, complete with red and yellow stripes, a little flag for the top and a painted sign that said THE MAGNIFICENT ZANETTI BROTHERS.

Rhian made several phone calls. It turned out that a traveling circus was performing that week in the village with almost the same name, and that our plain white tent had been delivered to them by mistake. Their show had already been advertised, the tickets had been sold, and they had no intention of performing under a tent that looked, in the ringmaster's words, "like a hospital". A swap was impossible. Either we used the circus tent, or the bands would play in the rain.

So the circus tent was put up. It took eleven volunteers, two farmers and most of Thursday, and the instructions had been written for people who had obviously done it a hundred times before. By the evening it was standing in the middle of the field, striped and shining, with its little flag moving in the wind. It looked ridiculous. It also looked wonderful.

Friday was the day everything was tested. The sound system was switched on and immediately made a noise that frightened the sheep in the next field. The lights were checked, the toilets were checked, and the sign about the Zanetti Brothers was covered with a festival banner, which kept falling off. At seven o'clock the gates were opened, and the first visitors walked into the field and stopped, staring at the tent.

I was worried they would be disappointed. Instead they took photos, children ran around it in circles, and someone started a rumor that there would be acrobats. The first band came on stage and said it was the best venue they had ever played in. By Saturday night, people were dressed as clowns.

On Monday the circus tent was taken down and driven back over the mountain, and our white tent was returned with a polite note from the ringmaster. Rhian has already been asked the same question a hundred times on social media: will the stripes be back next year? She says the decision has not been made yet. But I have noticed that a red and yellow tent has been added to the festival logo.